Police: Officers kill wanted man in Apache Junction

A 33-year-old man wanted in Pinal County on suspicion of attempted murder and aggravated assault of a law-enforcement officer was killed by police in Apache Junction on Saturday morning as the officers moved in to arrest him on warrants related to earlier crimes, said David Gonzales, U.S. marshal for Arizona.

Police working on a task force targeting wanted felons and felony suspects identified Trisoliere in Mesa on Saturday morning and followed him east, into Apache Junction, Gonzales said. When the car Trisoliere was riding in stopped, the officers moved in to arrest him and ended up shooting and killing him. It is not yet clear if Trisoliere was armed, Gonzales said.

“The actions of the suspect resulted in the officers responding with gunfire,” Gonzales said.

It brought a violent end to the annual fugitive roundup.

For five years, April has served as a reminder of past sins for several hundred fugitives in Arizona, as officers from dozens of law-enforcement agencies fan out across the state to clear warrants.

This year was no different: 231 arrests and 328 warrants cleared with 150 officers from 30 agencies participating in the weeklong roundup.

It brings the total to more than 1,000 fugitives apprehended in the five years the U.S. Marshals Service has coordinated the operation.

The raw data are striking, but the arrests are highlighted to bring attention to the Justice Department’s annual effort to call attention to victims rights, Gonzales said.

“One of the biggest complaints that victims of crime have about the criminal-justice system is that they feel that they have been forgotten,” Gonzales said. “This fugitive roundup, in conjunction with National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, is a focused effort to show that law enforcement has not, and will not forget. As a result of these arrests, we are taking off the streets individuals who commit numerous crimes to support themselves, thus reducing the number of citizens who will become victims of crime.”

Usually, more than half of the arrests in the roundup are related to drug charges, as they were this year, but the operation also captured arson, assault and sex-crime suspects.

Richard Lewis Jones Jr. was arrested at a relative’s apartment in Phoenix on April 14 on suspicion of setting fire to his wife’s house a day earlier, according to court documents.

Investigators believe Jones, 33, threatened to kill his wife during a phone call on April 13 and drove to her home 30 minutes later. Jones then threw a gas can through the bedroom window and set the house ablaze, authorities allege.

After Jones fled the scene, he borrowed phones from passengers, called his wife and left messages confessing the crime, according to court documents. Officials say Jones initially denied setting the fire, saying he was drunk, but changed his story after the voice mails were played.

In a previous case, Jones was convicted of reckless burning and was sentenced to one year of probation in 2008 for setting his girlfriend’s apartment on fire.

Investigators also arrested Kenneth Gibler, a 66-year-old Surprise man on suspicion of sexual conduct with a 5-year-old girl. Authorities say he confessed molesting the child when she was visiting her grandmother last April.

The annual roundup brings some sense of justice to the victims in those cases, and the sum of fugitives apprehended in the last five years has made a dent in the total number of fugitives living in the state, but the commitment to closing warrants has to be year-round, Gonzales said.

The number of open felony warrants, particularly in Maricopa County, has become a political football in recent years, with critics of Sheriff Joe Arpaio taking the opportunity to hammer the office for not arresting the 40,000 fugitives whose arrests have been ordered by county courts.

The Sheriff’s Office has consistently said that the agency is only the repository for the warrants and that the obligation to close the cases lies with each police agency.

A group of agencies, including the Sheriff’s Office and Marshals Service, along with court administrators, went through the list in 2011 and eliminated duplicate and expired warrants.

Those efforts, along with daily enforcement and annual events such as the Marshals Service roundup, have combined to bring the number of open warrants to below 30,000.

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